Product Description

Joseph Vaughan's life has been dogged by tragedy. Growing up in the 1950s, he was at the centre of series of killings of young girls in his small rural community. The girls were taken, assaulted and left horribly mutilated. Barely a teenager himself, Joseph becomes determined to try to protect his community and classmates from the predations of the killer. Despite banding together with his friends as ' The Guardians', he was powerless to prevent more murders - and no one was ever caught. Only after a full ten years did the nightmare end when the one of his neighbours is found hanging from a rope, with articles from the dead girls around him. Thankfully, the killings finally ceased. But the past won't stay buried - for it seems that the real murderer still lives and is killing again. And the secret of his identity lies in Joseph's own history...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #350 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 396 pages

My Weekly
"A meaty, involving drama which will catch you up in an emotional rollercoaster -- great reading"

Review
"A meaty, involving drama which will catch you up in an emotional rollercoaster -- great reading" (My Weekly )

"Very spine chilling... keeps you going right until the last page" (Amanda Ross )

Synopsis
Joseph Vaughan's life has been dogged by tragedy. Growing up in the 1950s, he was at the centre of series of killings of young girls in his small rural community. The girls were taken, assaulted and left horribly mutilated. Barely a teenager himself, Joseph becomes determined to try to protect his community and classmates from the predations of the killer. Despite banding together with his friends as ' The Guardians', he was powerless to prevent more murders - and no one was ever caught. Only after a full ten years did the nightmare end when the one of his neighbours is found hanging from a rope, with articles from the dead girls around him. Thankfully, the killings finally ceased. But the past won't stay buried - for it seems that the real murderer still lives and is killing again. And the secret of his identity lies in Joseph's own history...

Customer Reviews

Very interesting
I enjoyed reading this. I don't normally choose this type of fiction, but I found it most interesting. The descriptions are beautiful, parts read more like a poem, and the simple beauty in parts of this novel, lighten the mostly dark and disturbing storyline.
I would definately recomend this book, as not only a good thriller, but a poetic, and almost philosiphical read.

Over ambitious but interesting
I was gripped by the first quarter of this book - it is well written and original as it describes the effect on the hero Joseph and his community as young local girls are found brutally murdered. The contrast between the ordinariness of their everyday lives with the horror of the killings and their affect on the impressionable boy promises much.
Sadly it loses its way. Some reviewers have compared it to Steinbeck, Harper Lee, even J D Salinger. I don't thinks so - those books resonate universality - they touch you and make you think about your own life. Ellory's story becomes swamped in Vaughan's self-obsessive fatalism but can't make up its mind whether to be great prose tragedy, an insightful coming of age novel about an "artist" or a serial killer mystery. Ultimately it fails on all counts - the metaphors start to become repetitive or obscure, the plot becomes unsatisfactorily compressed when Joseph goes to New York and the final denouement is sudden but anti-climactic. Where Ellory scores is his study on the effects of the girls' murders, the power of blood ties, small town xenophobia in wartime. I'd recommend Guterson's "Snow Falling on Cedars" as a much better attempt at a "serious" murder mystery. In terms of serial killer not even a master of the genre like Thomas Harris wouldn't attempt 29 victims !

Swampy falsities! I didn't believe a word!
'I am an exile' states the ill starred narrator of Ellory's homage to To Kill a Mocking Bird. We are in a Southern small town scratching at the door of childhood innocence, privately listening to a narrator weighed down by the grim lessons of the past. Ellory takes care to detail the details of this past, mingling references to the wider world of the Second World War with the glimpses of daily impoverished Southern Life. Joseph Vaughan, the hero of this Richard and Judy recommended read, falls in love with his teacher and also has to face the uneasy sexual revelation that his widowed mother is sleeping with his German neigbour in return for the odd dollar or two each week. In the midst of this rites of passage narrative, we encounter murders most horrid; a serial child killer is loose, and the close community has to face the terrible revelation that it might be one of them.

All this sounds perhaps familiar and of course all stories repeat other stories and are haunted by echoes of others. Yet Ellory renders his narrative more ponderous and self-consciously 'regretful' than any novel I can remember. If you don't spot the killer before breakfast then you are probably being too distracted by pool side eye candy ...and all joy to you as this novel irritated me with its 'nostalgic' tone and unconvincing, self-condemnatory narration that wallowed in cliche and heavy handed signals of 'fate.'

Interestingly I suppose, it reveals the imaginative truth that intimacy cannot just be presumed created textually, especially through the indiscriminate littering of insinuating italics and wordly 'wise' guilty retrospect:

'How I sat across from Dearing, a man who had walked through my childhood with me, and the way his face sort of folded around the eyes, a sense of defeat, a ghost upon his shoulders, and the tone of his voice as he said...'( p.154)

Look at the weight of meaning engendered via the word 'How'. We hear the sigh of regret and then we are 'programmed' to acknowledge wistfully with the unlucky narrator, that retrospect gives shape to the chaos of life. But do we 'see' Dearing at all? Is he present in this word of sighs? And why does the final clause peter out into ellipsis? Of course we know( sigh) that Joseph 'knows' more as he writes now, than he ever could know at the time( sigh) and that such revelation( sigh) is best told through detail that privileges weary. blighted characterisation. Unless a character is 'real' to the reader before they are to be made dramatically 'useful' , then a writer cannot make his/him real through such heavy handed signposting. It's just posturing and I found myself trying to look behind these set pieces, blinking to see if anything or anyone was really there.

Guess what? Not a glimpse!